SOTI Works with OneLogin for SSO and Provisioning as It Moves to the Cloud

Mustafa Ebadi, Vice President of IT and Services at SOTI Inc., already had another identity and access management (IAM) implementation under his belt when he came to SOTI.

SOTI is the leading provider of enterprise mobility management (EMM) software. Its flagship product, SOTI MobiControl, manages over twenty million mobile devices across the globe.

As SOTI prepared for company growth, it was also migrating main office productivity and collaboration apps to the cloud so employees could work from anywhere, anytime.

ADFS or Cloud IAM Provider?

SOTI needed an identity access management solution quickly since they had already started to transition from on-premise Office to Office 365.

The IT team at SOTI weighed their options carefully. Ebadi recalls, “One of the reasons we chose OneLogin, a cloud IAM solution was that, with an on-prem solution, you have to manage it, maintain it, you’ll have to have head count dedicated for yet one more server to support what you want to do with identity access management.” He adds, “As an organization that believes in leveraging more and more into the cloud, making it easier for our people, and having an efficient and effective IT department, we chose cloud.”

How OneLogin Relieves Business Pain Points for SOTI

The IT department at SOTI had several business goals they wanted to achieve with a cloud IAM provider:

Remove the burden on users of remembering different usernames and passwords

Have a solution that is easy to configure, support, and maintain

Streamline onboarding processes

Have a user-friendly platform—something people actually would adopt and use

SSO as a “Single Pane of Glass”

As users at SOTI adopted popular SaaS apps, each user had to remember different usernames and passwords. Ebadi says, “We wanted to give them one single pane of glass, one application where they could access all their applications.” The OneLogin SSO Portal provides this ‘single pane of glass’ and removes the burden for SOTI users of having to remember multiple usernames and passwords.

The other advantage to the OneLogin Portal is that users can see what apps they have access to. “Whether they are moving between one department to the other or it’s their first day, they don’t have to worry or remember what tools they have access to,” explains Ebadi. They just have to remember one username and password, and every application they should have access to is in the portal.

Easy to Configure, Support and Maintain

“We wanted to get a solution that was easy to maintain and easy to support,” adds Ebadi. OneLogin has thousands of pre-integrated apps, including the main ones SOTI needs: Office 365, Workday, Salesforce, and Adobe.

Ebadi and his team deployed and implemented OneLogin within a span of 30 days for all SOTI users. “All our major tools were provisioned and we were using OneLogin for provisioning as well as deprovisioning,” reports Ebadi.

Streamlined Onboarding Processes

The burden of manual onboarding became obvious as the company swelled from 250 to 500 people with 7 global offices. Ebadi remembers, “It used to consume half, if not the whole Friday before the new hires start, for 3 or 4 people on my team, to provision new hires depending on the number of new hires we had.”

HR-Driven Identity with Workday

When an employee joins SOTI, HR enters their data into Workday and drops their userid into different security groups. Workday syncs in real-time with OneLogin, which then gives the employee SSO access to the appropriate applications and permissions. “The way we’ve built our provisioning is when a new hire is entered in the system, it triggers different levels of access and different levels of application. It’s very safe, it’s very secure,” explains Ebadi. He adds, “Our technical people do nothing to create accounts, do nothing to provision the accounts. We’ve automated it all. OneLogin is a very central piece to that.”

User-Friendly Platform

As IT departments know too well, people may be slow and resistant to change. Ebadi says, “When we changed our processes, changed some of the procedures to suit us for our growing needs, the fact that OneLogin is such an easy tool to leverage and easy tool to deploy, minimized the resistance of change among our users.”

He also adds that the friendly user experience of OneLogin helps SOTI with Shadow IT:
“It helps us with winning the confidence of our end users that we are their trusted advisor. The days of IT controlling are gone. Those days are over. IT has to be a trusted advisor. Has to be a group that enables the end users. A solution like OneLogin really helps us with containing and restricting the propagation of Shadow IT within SOTI.”

Supportive Partnership

“Right from the get go OneLogin did not treat us just as another customer,” says Ebadi. “From day one, OneLogin focused on, ‘What are the business pains and how we can solve it? Who are some of the technical folks that we need to speak with? Identify and answer some of the challenges of hesitations that they may have and how are we going to deploy a solution that can scale with SOTI’s growth, that can keep up with SOTI’s vision of going more and more on the cloud?’

About the Author

Thomas Bayens is responsible for customer marketing at OneLogin. With a background in marcom and communications, plus stints in product marketing, channel marketing and sales at business analytics, storage, and computing vendors, it is always interesting to interview customers, and to share their story and perspective of how and why they chose our company and product — and the value they perceive.

About the Author

Thomas Bayens is responsible for customer marketing at OneLogin. With a background in marcom and communications, plus stints in product marketing, channel marketing and sales at business analytics, storage, and computing vendors, it is always interesting to interview customers, and to share their story and perspective of how and why they chose our company and product — and the value they perceive.